Africa on The Carpentries

Subcommunity Spotlight: Africa

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Subcommunity Spotlight blog series aims to raise awareness of the many vibrant subcommunities within The Carpentries and highlight their activities. A brings together a subset of the broader Carpentries community. It may be local (e.g., a university-based Carpentries Club), regional (e.g., The Carpentries in Africa), or special interest-driven (e.g., HPC Carpentry, Carpentries-es, CarpentriesOffline). The series aims to foster connections among members, whether they live in the same region, speak a common language, or share similar interests. To learn more or get involved in a subcommunity, join the #subcommunity channel on Slack or reach out via email at community@carpentries.org. If you lead a subcommunity and would like to be featured in a future edition of this series, we’d love to hear from you!

#Carpentries25 Testimonial Series: Jean Baptiste Fankam Fankam

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In July 2023, The Carpentries turned 25 years! On July 24th we launched the #Carpentries25 anniversary celebrations, which will continue for the remainder of the year with a series of monthly events and weekly activities highlighting the global and regional contributions and impact of The Carpentries community.

This #Carpentries25 Testimonial Series is one way we will celebrate this milestone, and if you wish to contribute to this testimonial series please find the instructions in the celebrations announcement and reach out to us. Also, be sure to register to receive communications about upcoming monthly regional events.

Celebrating 25 Years of The Carpentries

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On 24 July 1998, the first Software Carpentry workshop, led by Greg Wilson and Brent Gorda, came to a close. The workshop aimed to teach researchers skills to work more effectively with their data.

Image by Greg Wilson of attendees at the first Software Carpentry workshop in 1998.

Wins and Challenges of Running a Carpentry Workshop in South Africa during Load shedding

Wed, 03 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Millions of people in Southern Africa are left without power for up to 12.5 hours daily due to load shedding. This is when a power supply can not provide enough electricity for all at once, and to avoid a total blackout, power is turned off in part or parts of a power grid. In the wake of COVID-19 in early 2020, The Carpentries transitioned to fully online workshops and still, most workshops offered in Southern Africa are online. One can only imagine the impact of running a Carpentries workshop online during load shedding.

IoT for Novices in South Africa

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Originally posted on the Society of Research Software Engineering website, this blog post highlights an Introduction to the Internet of Things workshop hosted at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the buzzwords that researchers would like to include in their research and grant applications, but few actually understand what it is. So, when I was asked by Kim Martin whether I could run a workshop at Stellenbosch University in South Africa to introduce a group of curious researchers to this thing they are hearing so much about I immediately agreed – as usual before completely thinking it through. I am not an IoT expert but merely an enthusiast that likes playing around with microcontrollers, sensors and computery things such as Raspberry Pis. I am also a research software engineer and I immediately saw an opportunity to introduce research software engineering to researchers – not only because the workshop is being presented by an RSE but also to tell them how an RSE can benefit their research.

CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021 - A global event

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The first virtual CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021 took place from 6 to 17 September. The event included 2 Carpentries workshops, 1 Carpentries instructor training event, 2 networking events, 1 learning session and 1 opening address.

The main goal of CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021 was to build capacity for workshops through instructor training and bring together newer and more experienced community members to share knowledge, network, develop new skills, and develop strategies for building strong local communities around digital and computational literacy in Africa.

Glosario: African contributions

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

During the last 12 months, the African Carpentries Community and other global members have mobilised efforts to translate English data science terms into the online, multilingual glossary of terms called Glosario. Translations were done into, among many others, Afrikaans, Amharic, Bahasa Indonesia, Setswana, isiXhosa, isiZulu and Kiswahili. These efforts build on the successes of Hacktoberfest 2020.

The glossary has grown into 17 languages in the past two years, most languages spoken in Africa. What follows highlights the African Carpentries Communities’ efforts during 2021.

Announcing The Carpentries African Capacity Development Manager, Angelique Trusler

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

For the past two years, Dr. Angelique Trusler has served as The Carpentries Regional Consultant for Southern Africa thanks to the generous support from the South African Center for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR). Angelique joined our team bringing depth, knowledge, and experience not only as a Carpentries instructor and community member in South Africa but also as a social sciences researcher and practitioner.

Developing a strategy for building The Carpentries community across Southern Africa has been Angelique’s passion and pride. Specifically, her leadership has helped us make progress on the following goals:

CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021 - A global event

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The first virtual CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021 took place from 6 to 17 September 2021. The event included 2 Carpentries workshops, 1 Carpentries instructor training event, 2 networking events, 1 learning session and 1 opening address. The main goal of CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021 was to build capacity for workshops through instructor training and bring together newer and more experienced community members to share knowledge, network, develop new skills, and develop strategies for building strong local communities around digital and computational literacy in Africa. The virtual event was attended by more than 120 attendees and volunteers (i.e. trainers, instructors and helpers) from 28 countries worldwide, including 16 countries in Africa. An estimated 300GB of mobile data was provided to 71 attendees over 19 African network providers.

Registration for CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021 now open!

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

What is CarpentryConnect?

CarpentryConnect events are regional Carpentry Community meetups that take place outside of the main international CarpentryCon meetup. The second South African CarpentryConnect will be held virtually and will bring together newer and more experienced community members to share knowledge, network, develop new skills, and develop strategies for building strong local communities around digital and computational literacy at universities.

The main goal of CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021 is to build capacity for workshops through instructor training and establish a network for the regional Carpentries community. The first South African CarpentryConnect took place in Johannesburg, South Africa in September 2018. CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021 will build on the successes of that first event, to bring together and grow the Carpentries community in Africa even further. Workshop fees and mobile data for African participants is funded by Code for Science and Society Event Fund.

University of the Western Cape’s first Data Carpentry Workshop of 2021

Mon, 24 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted on the University of the Western Cape’s eResearch Office website. The UWC eResearch Office promotes and supports the use of advanced information technologies to enable better, faster and higher-impact research. As research becomes increasingly data-driven, researchers in all fields require new skills in order to be able to manage their data effectively. This needs to happen throughout the research lifecycle, thus producing better, faster and higher-impact research. UWC Researchers can find resources and build solutions for their research data management needs with the help of the eResearch Office.

Our First Workshop - Bioinformatics Hub of Kenya

Tue, 18 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted on the Bioinformatics Hub of Kenya website. The Bioinformatics Hub of Kenya aims to bridge the gap between well-established bioinformaticians and aspiring ones through peer training and mentorship, so as to enhance collaborations to foster quality scientific research and innovations and promote the sharing of data, skills, and codes.

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” That is what we can say about our first R workshop, which was also our first workshop as the Bioinformatics Hub of Kenya (BHKi). We gathered the knowledge and experience we all had as a committee and put it together to deliver the two-day workshop. It happened on the 24th and 25th of March 2021, and it was such a journey. So let us take you through it.

Reflections on my First Data Carpentry Workshop

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted by the author on Medium and has been cross-posted here with the permission of the author.

It was 6:00 AM GMT on 28th September 2020, a Monday morning in Ghana and I was up and ready behind my computer, taking a final glance through the materials for my participation in a Data Carpentries Workshop, organized by SADiLaR (South African Center for Digital Language Resources) in partnership with the Carpentries in Africa.

Lessons Learned - Data Carpentries Workshop for SADiLaR (August 31, 2020)

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

The call went out for instructors and helpers to cover the Data Carpentries Workshop from 31 August to 4 September 2020. Five instructors and two helpers were selected. We had two instructors from England (Jannetta and Varshita), one from France (Samuel), one from Kenya (Benson), one from Japan (Maggi), and two from South Africa (Marissa and Lactatia).

Preparation for the workshop

The workshop was organised by Angelique Trusler, the Regional Consultant for Southern Africa. Attendees were sent instructions in an email on how to download and install the data and software required. A couple of weeks before the workshop the instructors and helpers were put into contact with one another via email to decide who would do what during the workshop. We used a shared online spreadsheet to indicate which parts we would like to teach and who would be able to act as helpers on what days.

Learners' Experiences from South Africa's Online Workshop

Thu, 28 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

COVID-19 has had an impact on in-person meetings globally, and South Africa’s Carpentries workshops are no exception. Under an ongoing national lockdown, tertiary institutions are closed leaving students without access to internet and computer laboratories. The General Household Survey of South Africa (2018) indicated that only 10.14% of households have access to internet at home.

There is a silver lining, some universities have stepped up to bridge the digital divide and are offering access to laptops and mobile data for students to continue the academic year online (on loan or reduced prices). SADiLaR used this ‘chopportunity’ to host its first three-day Online Data Carpentry Workshop from May 5-7. Six learners from South Africa and the United Kingdom attended the online workshop, which covered Data Carpentry’s R for Social Scientists curriculum.

With Thanks from Carpentries Instructors in Africa

Thu, 12 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The African Instructors Community is made up of individuals who volunteer their time to teach foundational coding and data science skills to researchers on the continent. Ending 2019 on a positive note, not only was there a growth in the number of trained instructors, an increase in African countries joining The Carpentries community, but a Regional Consultant for Southern Africa has also been appointed to support the team of volunteer instructors across the continent.

Introducing our new Regional Consultant for Southern Africa.

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Angelique Trusler to The Carpentries team. Angelique joins the team through support from the South African Center for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR). Her work will advance SADiLaR’s community and workshop efforts in Southern Africa with a particular focus on advancing the development and deployment of Digital Humanities workshop materials. More broadly, Angelique will be developing strategies and workflows to adapt The Carpentries’ membership and workshop programs to function optimally in Southern Africa. She brings her experience and passion in data and software skills training to this role, and will advise The Carpentries on how to best adapt our programs to thrive in Southern Africa. Angelique will also assist and advise in developing a plan to create and support a strong team of volunteer instructors across the region. We are thrilled to have her on the team!

Teaching Software Carpentry at the University of Botswana

Thu, 10 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

On 16-19 September, I taught a Software Carpentry workshop at the University of Botwsana.

The workshop was hosted by the Southern Africa Innovation Support (SAIS) Universities-Industry-Government (UIG) Co-creation Platform and had more than 30 learners.

Because Professor Tshiamo Motshegwa was travelling during the workshop, Badisa Mosesane was in charge of talk about The Carpentries and introduce me.

Badisa Mosesane explaining about The Carpentries.

During the workshop, I taught navigating files and directories with Bash, working With files and directories with Bash, for-loop with Bash, Git, GitHub, for-loop with Python, if-clause with Python, Python functions, Python scripts, debugging Python code, and Make.

Wrapping Up the Rural Campuses Connection Project Capacity Development Initiative.

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Rural Campuses Connection Project (RCCP) ran since 2010 in South Africa with the aim of bringing better internet connectivity to various rural campuses of publicly funded universities and research institutions. In the earliest phase the project included funding for physical infrastructure as well as design and implementation of networks. During RCCP phase 2 (RCCPII) a portion of funding was set aside for capacity development around internet connectivity. RCCP was funded through the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), managed by Universities South Africa (USAf), and implemented by the Tertiary Research and Education Network (TENET).

Highlights from the recent Instructor Training in South Africa

Mon, 08 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in Durban, South Africa, hosted its first Carpentries instructor training from 18th to 20th of March 2019. This training was conducted by us - Katrin Tirok (Durban), Samar Elsheikh (University of Cape Town), and Saymore Chifamba (Siyavula, Cape Town), the three brand new trainers in South Africa, and Malvika Sharan (EMBL) from Germany.

Katrin organised this training in association with the Research Flagship in Big Data and Informatics at UKZN and the RCCPII Capacity Development Initiative managed by Talarify. Co-funding the training allowed us to invite participants from different institutions to enhance the networking of future instructors and convey the idea of a larger community right at the training. Our participants came from the University of Fort Hare, University of Zululand, Rhodes University, Mangosuthu University of Technology, TENET as well as from UKZN. They represented postgraduate students, lecturers, professors and support staff coming from the computer, environmental, health, information and library, life, and social sciences.

Growing The Carpentries Community in Africa: Hiring a Regional Coordinator

Tue, 05 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries activities in Africa have been growing through exemplary volunteer work of the community and outstanding workshop coordination and community leadership from Anelda van der Walt. We are now looking to hire a Regional Coordinator to continue this work and support the community and workshops as activity in Africa grows. This position will join our team of Regional Coordinators - read more about that group and the work they do to support their regional communities.

A Wrap-up from the African Task Force

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

At the end of 2017 eight Carpentries community members volunteered to serve on the African Task Force to help strengthen the local community. At a meeting in February 2018 we decided to focus on mentoring trained instructors and on creating awareness of The Carpentries in Africa. In this short report we share some of the highlights of the past year, give an overview of our activities, and also reflect on the lessons learned.

CarpentryConnect Johannesburg 2018: Building Bridges for Digital and Computational Literacy.

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

During the first week of September 2018, CarpentryConnect Johannesburg was run in South Africa.

Although we initially dreamt of running an open event (similar to CarpentryCon in Dublin) we had to weigh up the benefits of opening the event up with the risks of not being able to attract enough people due to the associated costs. Over the past few years we’ve realised that getting institutions to invest (pay registration fees and cover travel costs) in something they have never heard about, is quite hard. Especially at a time when travel budgets are cut and embargoes are being placed on travel (most notably for university support staff).

CarpentryCon Experienced by the African Carpentry Task Force

Sun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to The Carpentries and funding from conference sponsors, as well as TENET, the members of the African Carpentry Task Force were all able to attend the inaugural CarpentryCon event that took place at University College Dublin, Ireland, between 29 May and 1 June, 2018. Each of us has written a brief summary of our experience and takeaways from the conference, and we all agree that the event was an extremely valuable experience that exceeded all our expectations!

Revival of the African Task Force

Tue, 13 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Over the past five years, the Carpentries have gained considerable traction in Africa. Since the first online instructor training in 2015, more than 100 African-based instructors have been trained of which more than 40 had qualified. An estimated 50 workshops have taken place on the continent in countries including South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Mauritius, Kenya, Ghana, Gabon, and Ethiopia. More than 15 instructors from other continents have visited the continent to join local instructors in building community and teaching workshops. These include instructors from the UK, several states in the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, and New Zealand.

CAB-Alliance Bioinformatics Workshop in Franceville, Gabon

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Over the past five years, researchers from the University of New Orleans (UNO) in the USA and the Université des Sciences et Techniques de Masuku (USTM), Franceville, Gabon and University of Buea (UB) - have been working closely together as part of a larger collaborative initiative to map patterns of genomic and phenotypic variation in rainforest species across central Africa. This international partnership known as the Central African Biodiversity (CAB) Alliance is made up of a number of institutions in the US, Africa and Europe and is primarily funded through the National Science Foundation’s Partnership in International Research and Education program.

Reporting on the Second Software Carpentry Workshop in Namibia

Sun, 10 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Background

After attending this year’s African Instructors Meetup in Cape Town South Africa, Jessica Upani and Gabriel Nhinda from Namibia started laying the groundwork for another Software Carpentry workshop for Namibia. The previous workshop took place about a year ago as part of a 12-month programme to build computing capacity in Africa. This year however, the workshop was initiated, organised and taught by exclusively local instructors and helpers, Gabriel and Jessica with assistance from Ruber.

Software Carpentry Introduces Mauritian HPC Users to Tools for Data Analysis

Sun, 10 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) has been branded as one of the biggest scientific projects to date and spans not only country borders but also continents. Although the SKA’s primary aim is to address many of the questions around our universe, the spin-offs of this project will touch people from all research disciplines as well as communities around the SKA sites.

One of the spin-offs is expanded human and infrastructure capacity in terms of High Performance Computing (HPC) in other African countries. The South African Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) is involved in a programme named the HPC Ecosystems Project. The Ecosystems Project focuses on the distribution of decommissioned HPC equipment to be used as mid-tier systems at various sites across Africa. This is followed with training of the system administrators to run the equipment.

The First Ever Data Carpentry in Ethiopia

Sun, 10 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Ethiopian Education and Research Network (EthERNet) from the Ministry of Education in collaboration with the German International Cooperation (GIZ) Sustainable Training and Education Programme (STEP), the Education Strategy Center (ESC) and Talarify organised its first ever Data Carpentry workshop for young academics and researchers in Ethiopia. The workshop was conducted over two and a half days from 14-16 August 2017 at Addis Ababa Institute of Technology (AAiT). The main aim was to increase data literacy for researchers and establish a community of good research data practice in Ethiopia in order to increase the presence of Ethiopian researchers in the global research community. Note: UNESCO Statistics Institute reveals that in 2016 1.1% of the global research community are researchers coming from Sub-Saharan Africa. On average 30.4% from all Sub-Saharan researchers are females, whereas Ethiopia counts 13.3 % female researchers out of all Ethiopian researchers.

The Data Carpentry journey to University of Venda, South Africa

Wed, 02 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

My name is Ivo Arrey and I am a graduate student at the University of Venda, South Africa. I first encountered a Carpentry-style workshop in 2015 when I was still part of the South African Earth Observation Network and its Graduate Student Network (SAEON-GSN) committee that organised the annual Indibano. Like it has been the culture of previous meetings, we usually set aside a slot for a workshop that teaches a new skill to delegates. I had my first encounter to a new way of automating repetitive tasks using Git and Unix Shell which was a mouth-watering experience and later R for new methods of data analysis to explore. Then came the opportunity to attend the instructor training with Software and Data Carpentry in North-West University, Potchefstroom campus which I immediately knew was the best way to consolidate my hands-on for these new skills which I had begun to grapple with for some time now.

Instructor Training in South Africa 2.0

Tue, 09 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

One of the main goals of our community is to make Software and Data Carpentry workshops accessible for all researchers from all disciplines and all regions of the world. In the past three years workshops in South Africa and other African countries have started gradually picking up and I think we may soon see exponential growth!

This has been made possible thanks to a lot of effort and hard work from a number of amazing people, including Anelda van der Walt. In 2014 we realised that the biggest obstacle to running workshops in Africa, was the lack of qualified trainers on the continent. Since then we’ve put significant focus on building a local instructor pool to enable research organisations in the region to run Software and Data Carpentry training. In 2015 several instructors were trained online. Last year North West University at Potchefstroom hosted the first in-person Instructor Training with attendees from South Africa and other African countries. Just last week, between 30th April and 2nd May, we (Anelda, Kari Jordan and Aleksandra Pawlik) ran another Instructor Training in Cape Town with 28 participants.

South Africa's North-West University Becomes Software and Data Carpentry’s first African Partner

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

In November 2014 the first large-scale Software Carpentry event was run in South Africa [1] as part of the eResearch Africa conference [2] in Cape Town. Since then 15 more Software, Data, and/or Library Carpentry events were run by the Southern African community across many disciplines and several institutions [3, 4, 5].

Building Genomics Data Analysis Capacity at NWU

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The North-West University in South Africa boasts two next generation sequencing (NGS) platforms and additionally receive terabytes of NGS data annually from local and international service providers. Research projects with NGS components exist in the areas of Microbiology, Zoology, Botany, Nutrition, Agriculture, and more.

The three biggest challenges experienced by researchers and postgraduate students in terms of data analysis are as follow:

many of the students entering NGS projects have limited prior exposure to molecular techniques such as Sanger sequencing and PCR, and genetics concepts;
there is limited access to bioinformatics support and training (although there is lots of access to short interventions like 1- or 2-day workshops with no sustained follow-up);
and they are not aware of the range of research compute infrastructures which are available to them.

In September 2016, the NWU eResearch Initiative helped to establish a Genomics Hacky Hour (GHH) Study Group to support postgraduate students and researchers using NGS technologies. The original intention of the GHH was to bring researchers together to work on their current projects. However, limited shared NGS vocabulary hampered constructive communication amongst researchers and it was decided that specific topics would be discussed during the first few sessions, lead by a study group leader.

Library Carpentry is coming to Africa

Fri, 19 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Library Carpentry website

The first Library Carpentry workshop in Africa will be held in Pretoria, South Africa on August 25 & 26. Here is the site for the workshop which is being generously hosted by CSIR.

This Library Carpentry workshop is supported by NeDICC, North-West University and Talarify.

Software and Data Carpentry Instructor Training Comes to Africa

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

by Anelda van der Walt

North-West University eResearch, UCT eResearch, and Talarify are excited to announce that a Software & Data Carpentry Instructor Training event will take place in Potchefstroom, North-West Province, South Africa from 17 - 20 April 2016.

The lead trainer will be Aleksandra Pawlik, a Data Carpentry Steering Committee member. She will be joined by several of the more experienced South African instructors who provide additional support working with the trainee instructors.

Data Carpentry in Africa

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

by Matt Collins at iDigBio x Data Carpentry conducted its first workshop on the African continent in September! As part of the pre-conference training week held before the Taxonomic Databases Working Group’s (TDWG) annual conference, Deb Paul, Matthew Collins, Libby Ellwood and Kevin Love put on a two day Data Carpentry workshop at the Multimedia University of Kenya. We taught the ecology lessons (spreadsheets, OpenRefine, R, but no SQL) to participants from 12 African countries. The participants were all graduate students and young researchers whose travel and participation in both the training week and the TDWG conference were paid for by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation. This was a significant investment on their part to build capacity for biodiversity informatics in Africa and we were excited to have Data Carpentry be a part of the effort.